This post was made mostly in response to other balance posts I’ve seen on the forums, which tend to focus on specific imbalances in individual units and don’t take into account the totality or ‘big picture’ of the balance between factions when making balance suggestions, and should describe the baseline assumptions that need to be considered when making a balance suggestion.
The various factions have different power budgets which are allotted in various areas of their tech trees. Balance, in my view, should mainly be done by considering the interaction of the set of advantages and disadvantages all the factions have on a representative set of maps, based solely on the highest possible level of 1v1 and then teamgame play. Typically, in high level games, a faction pick for a given map is decided by a specific advantage or set of advantages that faction has over other factions for that specific map.
Let us take a look at some maps for some concrete examples of each faction’s strengths. I tried to find games with non-mirror matchups from tournaments that demonstrate the strength of the particular faction. Of course, there is imbalance in skill between players that can account for how specific games turn out, but overall the faction balance should be correct.
UEF on crazyrush
See #12729015, Nexus- vs archsimkat
· UEF is heavily favored on crazyrush specifically for sparkies (for nice t2 pd+t2 arty), scorcher/janus (to crush all the mexes/pgens), ravagers, and nice t3 land.
Seraphim on Crossfire Canal
See #13059258, archsimkat vs ZLO
· Seraphim is heavily favored on crossfire because of floating t1 arty cancer. Decent floating t2 tanks and flak are also relevant considerations to keep in mind.
Aeon on Badlands
See #1336249, Blast_ vs Petric
· A large amount of Aeon’s power budget is allocated into chrono, which is currently very very strong. On maps like Badlands as Aeon, you would go into the game with a plan to go chrono.
Cybran on Painted Desert
See #12728714, TURBO2 vs BlinChik
· Cybran is favored on Painted because of the speed of the mantis and loyalist, as well as stealthed t3 strat bomber (to kill all the t2 mexes).
With these examples in mind, any balance discussion should include a discussion of the overall faction balance beyond a specific unit for a set of maps. Maps can also be grouped together in a similar way: e.g., Crossfire and Point of Reach are similar maps in terms of the factional advantages and disadvantages; Painted Desert and the Ditch are similar, etc. Interestingly, this leaves room to allow for balance to be done by maps alone, but that’s a discussion for another time.
An example of one such balance suggestion based on the examples listed that fulfills this criteria would be to rebalance the Aeon power budget by giving its T1 MAA, the Thistle, the ability to hover, giving Aeon a stronger favorability on hover cancer maps like Crossfire (which will probably still be sera favored), while nerfing the chrono dampener somewhat + slight buffs for the obsidian, to reduce the obscene amount of power budget in chrono while still keeping aeon competitive in the t2 stage. This is just the most rough first draft example I could come up with that uses these criteria, so don’t take this suggestion too seriously, the point of this post is more about laying the groundwork for future balance discussion.
Hopefully this post can help provide a framework to better understand faction balance, provide a springboard for ideas for faction balance (in terms of both identifying issues and presenting solutions), and lead to better quality balance posts overall. If people disagree with any of the points I raised, feel free to discuss below but please point out the fundamental assumptions you have, like I did in this post, when you respond.